(I'll admit that I burst into laughter after reading this line).
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Peter Hallward, quote of the day:
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
How to Radicalize Graduate Students:
From Academe's July-August Issue:
Take these simple steps to intimidate, alienate, and agitate your own flock of graduate students.
By Heather Steffen
As the recession, budget cuts, endowment losses, and Republican governors gut university funding, campuses across the country have become host to occupations, union actions, and demonstrations.
Except for yours. When you gaze out on the quad, all that greets you is a file of book-bagged undergraduates nose deep in text messages, a few graduate students hauling books and lab equipment, and that weird squirrel with the crooked tail. What’s wrong with your corner of the ivory tower? Why aren’t your students marching shoulder to shoulder with the others? You included a three-week unit on Marxist criticism in your fall syllabus and proudly display your Obama ’08 poster, and last month you tacked a strip of Jorge Cham’s comic critique of academia over the photocopier, but your graduate students stubbornly look only to their reading, teaching, and the lab.
If this sounds like your campus, it’s time for a change. The steps below offer simple ways to rile up and radicalize your university’s graduate student population. Why target graduate students? Because they live and work at the crux of the university: when they’re not bothering you, these people are teaching undergraduates, giving conference papers, and living lives entwined with the community. Radicalize them and your university’s troubles will be broadcast where it counts—the classroom, the hotel bar, the statehouse. (And you can be assured, doctoral students will protest with abandon, having already demonstrated an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation by considering academic employment in the first place.)
But before we get to the steps you need to take, one caveat administrator: the things that radicalize are the same things that enervate. Your graduate students, appearances to the contrary, are intelligent adults with adult responsibilities and concerns. Those Chuck Taylor sneakers carry them home at the end of the day to support partners, care for children, feed pets, and call aging parents. Pressures and duties of that magnitude, on top of the commitments they’ve made to your university, are what make each turn of the screw worth two. But if you push too far, you’ll exhaust your most capable rabble-rousers and wind up with nothing but a bunch of broken-spirited, careerist brownnosers in your program.
On the upside, they’ll probably improve your program ranking, but walk this tightrope carefully. If you follow these six steps and keep a sharp eye out for signs of the tipping point between insurrection and burnout, your campus, too, can ring with the tones of disaffection, discontent, and incipient democracy.
Step 1. Build on graduate students’ existing strength: worrying. Depending on your region and Carnegie classification, you may be well on your way to creating a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt among your graduate students, and lord knows they arrive with plenty of that already on hand. But no matter how competitive and intimidating your campus is, the first step to fostering a vibrant radical population of graduate students is getting their hearts beating faster. These three tactics are sure to give any grad student’s pulse a jump-start:
A. Evaluation Assassination. When you evaluate a graduate student’s work, do you treat it like that of a future colleague, engaging with its ideas and style as if you were reading a friend’s article draft? If so, you’ll need to relearn your approach to grading. every seminar paper and dissertation chapter represents an opportunity to shake a graduate student to the very core. An offhand “This is not doctoral-level work” will more than suffice in most cases. (Nota bene: The probability of a demand for rationale decreases in inverse proportion to the time between submission and return of work.)
B. The Draft-and-Switch. Prospectus, research performance evaluation, thesis overview, dissertation: the merest whisper of any of these words makes graduate students curse having lapsed (“It was only one slice!”) on that irritable bowel syndrome diet. The draft-and-switch takes advantage of their inevitable prostration before the task of defining an academic identity. Advisers, perk up your ears.
A prospectus draft hits your inbox. Open that sucker up and give it a skim—does the lit review or the original research get more airtime? Whichever it is, fire off a response within hours apprising your student that she’s failed to incorporate the other. Include a list of at least six monographs against which the student has not adequately positioned herself, and request a total rewrite within three months.
Revision in hand, warm up your reply button, because you’re about to drop a bomb: the document must again be completely recast, and you are concerned about the project’s viability: “This reads like a review essay; what is your argument?” Before closing, recall to the student’s mind that her standing in the program depends upon swift approval by multiple entities and reveal that you are not at this juncture certain of her ability to meet the deadline. Will the student think she’s lost her mind? Will she spend the next two hours combing through her e-mail for your previous comments? Yes, all the while shaking like a leaf. Give yourself a pat on the back, open a celebratory diet coke, and wait for draft three.
C. The HPT Meeting. Around the Pentagon, HPT stands for “high-payoff target,” and that’s exactly what you’re aiming for, so use this tactic sparingly. Here, HPT is a mnemonic you can use to plan meetings with overconfident graduate students.
A few days after a friendly interaction (drinks at a reception, a chat in the hall about good news on the publishing front, or some similar light conversation), casually request a meeting with your student to check up on his progress. Be sure to say something personal in the e-mail to maximize the sense of informality (“I was glad to hear that your cat’s surgery was successful!”).
Meeting set, the HPT agenda proceeds as follows: (1) Humiliate the student immediately by asking an exam-style question tangential to his area of knowledge. After he stumbles through an answer, inform him that he is devastatingly wrong (for proper affect management, imagine he’s just farted audibly while speaking). As he tilts toward the abyss of his self- doubt, (2) patronizingly offer an olive branch to help him out—a task useful to your own research that also happens to be the only thing capable of saving him from his overwhelming wrongness. You’ll either get a domesticated free research assistant or he’ll resist, declaring that that is not what his project is about at all. If the latter occurs, (3) bring out the threats: “It will be very hard for your thesis to gain my approval if this is not accounted for.” As fear enters your student’s eyes, open the door, extend your best wishes to the cat, and tell him you’ll look forward to seeing how his work progresses. If you’re not naturally coldhearted, the HPT meeting might shake you up a little, but keep in mind that as you’re sipping your evening pinot, your student might be getting in touch with his inner Wobbly at the bar down the street.
Step 2. Practice nepotism and lack of transparency in policy and decision making. Experienced administrators will roll their eyes at this one: “I already do that. I wasn’t promoted because of my sterling teaching record, you know.” But for the sake of faculty readers new to the managerial rim of the labor divide (that’s you, Ohioans), a few words on nepotism and obfuscation are in order.
Nepotism in regard to graduate students is easy, and chances are you’re already better at it than you think. Have you ever invited a couple of friends to present on a panel because writing a call for proposals would take too long or given the nod to a mediocre job candidate whose thesis happens to be signed by your college roommate? Congratulations, you’re half-way there! Now just turn the same principles to the assignment of plum classes and jobs to your favorite graduate students.
When they start to notice the repetitions in the course catalog, it’s time to shut the window on your decision-making process. Remember that graduate students are heavily invested in meritocratic and democratic ideals, so if they see perks accruing where they aren’t deserved and program requirements becoming a moving target, they’re going to want to nose out the culprit. By keeping the decision-making process tightly under wraps, you’ll not only increase its efficiency but also help your graduate students hone their investigative research and networking skills while they close read the handbook and compare notes with their comrades in other departments. Suppression of information is the agar in the petri dish of revolt, after all.
Step 3. Raise tuition and fees. Graduate students don’t pay tuition, do they? But why not? Take a look at your department’s budget sheet—how many of your hard-earned FTEs are wasted reimbursing the university for graduate credit hours? No one’s even teaching those classes, what with the pack of dinosaur ABDs you’ve got hanging around. A refresher on accounting and some well-timed hints about counterbalancing the athletic director’s fall spending spree will not only unify students across the two cultures, it might even get your name on the CFO’s go-to list next time a spot opens up in administration. To preview the results you can get from this one simple tip, look no further than California and Illinois, where just the threat of tuition increase spurred months of strikes, insurgent dance parties, and the authoring of manifesto upon manifesto.
Step 4. Pay them below the living wage. Choosing to starve your students might sound distasteful, but if they’re getting PhDs in late-thirteenth-century barley farming or the morphology of south Bolivian musk gnats, they must come from well-to-do backgrounds, right? These pampered savants need a reason to identify with the working man, and there’s no better way to foster identification than to make sure they’re standing behind him in the Shop ’n Save checkout line instead of flipping through a Dwell at Whole Foods. It might make them less entertaining dinner companions, but the gains in class consciousness will more than compensate for any lack of fluency in microgreens and manchego.
Step 5. Cut centers, programs, and departments. Even—if you’re as daring as the Minnesotans were—dissolve the graduate school. For maximum impact, go for the arts and humanities first. Donors and corporate partners are unlikely to register the loss, and students on the softer side of campus are already steeped in leftist theory, jealous of their profs’ glory days in the sixties and convinced of the need to enlighten the masses, so they’ll take the dissolution particularly hard. (And when was the last time you saw video of stomatology students getting arrested for failure to disperse?)
Step 6. Keep that tenured head buried in the sand. Are flyers about a graduate student union showing up on the bulletin board across the hall? Did the administration just announce that graduate tuition and fees are going up? Who cares? You’ve already got fifty-two hours of research, peer reviewing, committee work, and lecturing to do every week, so going to bat for your grad students is the last thing on your to-do list, and you should let them know that—loud and clear. If a wild-eyed graduate student idealist asks you to talk to your faculty senate or to advocate for the union, blink confusedly, mumble something that intelligibly includes the word “busy,” and remember to keep your office lights dimmed next time you come in for a meeting. Knowing they’re on their own encourages graduate student self-reliance and solidarity with organizations that really can help them out.
Follow these six easy steps, and pretty soon your campus could join the lucky ones already garnering the attention of police and Fox news anchors. Then you can sit back and let your grad students and the exasperated public take it from there. As one effectively and efficiently radicalized student at the University at Albany put it last January, “A lot of people who are supposed to be protecting us aren’t doing that. So unless we turn a little wolfish on them, they’ll just eat the sheep.”
Take these simple steps to intimidate, alienate, and agitate your own flock of graduate students.
By Heather Steffen
As the recession, budget cuts, endowment losses, and Republican governors gut university funding, campuses across the country have become host to occupations, union actions, and demonstrations.
Except for yours. When you gaze out on the quad, all that greets you is a file of book-bagged undergraduates nose deep in text messages, a few graduate students hauling books and lab equipment, and that weird squirrel with the crooked tail. What’s wrong with your corner of the ivory tower? Why aren’t your students marching shoulder to shoulder with the others? You included a three-week unit on Marxist criticism in your fall syllabus and proudly display your Obama ’08 poster, and last month you tacked a strip of Jorge Cham’s comic critique of academia over the photocopier, but your graduate students stubbornly look only to their reading, teaching, and the lab.
If this sounds like your campus, it’s time for a change. The steps below offer simple ways to rile up and radicalize your university’s graduate student population. Why target graduate students? Because they live and work at the crux of the university: when they’re not bothering you, these people are teaching undergraduates, giving conference papers, and living lives entwined with the community. Radicalize them and your university’s troubles will be broadcast where it counts—the classroom, the hotel bar, the statehouse. (And you can be assured, doctoral students will protest with abandon, having already demonstrated an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation by considering academic employment in the first place.)
But before we get to the steps you need to take, one caveat administrator: the things that radicalize are the same things that enervate. Your graduate students, appearances to the contrary, are intelligent adults with adult responsibilities and concerns. Those Chuck Taylor sneakers carry them home at the end of the day to support partners, care for children, feed pets, and call aging parents. Pressures and duties of that magnitude, on top of the commitments they’ve made to your university, are what make each turn of the screw worth two. But if you push too far, you’ll exhaust your most capable rabble-rousers and wind up with nothing but a bunch of broken-spirited, careerist brownnosers in your program.
On the upside, they’ll probably improve your program ranking, but walk this tightrope carefully. If you follow these six steps and keep a sharp eye out for signs of the tipping point between insurrection and burnout, your campus, too, can ring with the tones of disaffection, discontent, and incipient democracy.
Step 1. Build on graduate students’ existing strength: worrying. Depending on your region and Carnegie classification, you may be well on your way to creating a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt among your graduate students, and lord knows they arrive with plenty of that already on hand. But no matter how competitive and intimidating your campus is, the first step to fostering a vibrant radical population of graduate students is getting their hearts beating faster. These three tactics are sure to give any grad student’s pulse a jump-start:
A. Evaluation Assassination. When you evaluate a graduate student’s work, do you treat it like that of a future colleague, engaging with its ideas and style as if you were reading a friend’s article draft? If so, you’ll need to relearn your approach to grading. every seminar paper and dissertation chapter represents an opportunity to shake a graduate student to the very core. An offhand “This is not doctoral-level work” will more than suffice in most cases. (Nota bene: The probability of a demand for rationale decreases in inverse proportion to the time between submission and return of work.)
B. The Draft-and-Switch. Prospectus, research performance evaluation, thesis overview, dissertation: the merest whisper of any of these words makes graduate students curse having lapsed (“It was only one slice!”) on that irritable bowel syndrome diet. The draft-and-switch takes advantage of their inevitable prostration before the task of defining an academic identity. Advisers, perk up your ears.
A prospectus draft hits your inbox. Open that sucker up and give it a skim—does the lit review or the original research get more airtime? Whichever it is, fire off a response within hours apprising your student that she’s failed to incorporate the other. Include a list of at least six monographs against which the student has not adequately positioned herself, and request a total rewrite within three months.
Revision in hand, warm up your reply button, because you’re about to drop a bomb: the document must again be completely recast, and you are concerned about the project’s viability: “This reads like a review essay; what is your argument?” Before closing, recall to the student’s mind that her standing in the program depends upon swift approval by multiple entities and reveal that you are not at this juncture certain of her ability to meet the deadline. Will the student think she’s lost her mind? Will she spend the next two hours combing through her e-mail for your previous comments? Yes, all the while shaking like a leaf. Give yourself a pat on the back, open a celebratory diet coke, and wait for draft three.
C. The HPT Meeting. Around the Pentagon, HPT stands for “high-payoff target,” and that’s exactly what you’re aiming for, so use this tactic sparingly. Here, HPT is a mnemonic you can use to plan meetings with overconfident graduate students.
A few days after a friendly interaction (drinks at a reception, a chat in the hall about good news on the publishing front, or some similar light conversation), casually request a meeting with your student to check up on his progress. Be sure to say something personal in the e-mail to maximize the sense of informality (“I was glad to hear that your cat’s surgery was successful!”).
Meeting set, the HPT agenda proceeds as follows: (1) Humiliate the student immediately by asking an exam-style question tangential to his area of knowledge. After he stumbles through an answer, inform him that he is devastatingly wrong (for proper affect management, imagine he’s just farted audibly while speaking). As he tilts toward the abyss of his self- doubt, (2) patronizingly offer an olive branch to help him out—a task useful to your own research that also happens to be the only thing capable of saving him from his overwhelming wrongness. You’ll either get a domesticated free research assistant or he’ll resist, declaring that that is not what his project is about at all. If the latter occurs, (3) bring out the threats: “It will be very hard for your thesis to gain my approval if this is not accounted for.” As fear enters your student’s eyes, open the door, extend your best wishes to the cat, and tell him you’ll look forward to seeing how his work progresses. If you’re not naturally coldhearted, the HPT meeting might shake you up a little, but keep in mind that as you’re sipping your evening pinot, your student might be getting in touch with his inner Wobbly at the bar down the street.
Step 2. Practice nepotism and lack of transparency in policy and decision making. Experienced administrators will roll their eyes at this one: “I already do that. I wasn’t promoted because of my sterling teaching record, you know.” But for the sake of faculty readers new to the managerial rim of the labor divide (that’s you, Ohioans), a few words on nepotism and obfuscation are in order.
Nepotism in regard to graduate students is easy, and chances are you’re already better at it than you think. Have you ever invited a couple of friends to present on a panel because writing a call for proposals would take too long or given the nod to a mediocre job candidate whose thesis happens to be signed by your college roommate? Congratulations, you’re half-way there! Now just turn the same principles to the assignment of plum classes and jobs to your favorite graduate students.
When they start to notice the repetitions in the course catalog, it’s time to shut the window on your decision-making process. Remember that graduate students are heavily invested in meritocratic and democratic ideals, so if they see perks accruing where they aren’t deserved and program requirements becoming a moving target, they’re going to want to nose out the culprit. By keeping the decision-making process tightly under wraps, you’ll not only increase its efficiency but also help your graduate students hone their investigative research and networking skills while they close read the handbook and compare notes with their comrades in other departments. Suppression of information is the agar in the petri dish of revolt, after all.
Step 3. Raise tuition and fees. Graduate students don’t pay tuition, do they? But why not? Take a look at your department’s budget sheet—how many of your hard-earned FTEs are wasted reimbursing the university for graduate credit hours? No one’s even teaching those classes, what with the pack of dinosaur ABDs you’ve got hanging around. A refresher on accounting and some well-timed hints about counterbalancing the athletic director’s fall spending spree will not only unify students across the two cultures, it might even get your name on the CFO’s go-to list next time a spot opens up in administration. To preview the results you can get from this one simple tip, look no further than California and Illinois, where just the threat of tuition increase spurred months of strikes, insurgent dance parties, and the authoring of manifesto upon manifesto.
Step 4. Pay them below the living wage. Choosing to starve your students might sound distasteful, but if they’re getting PhDs in late-thirteenth-century barley farming or the morphology of south Bolivian musk gnats, they must come from well-to-do backgrounds, right? These pampered savants need a reason to identify with the working man, and there’s no better way to foster identification than to make sure they’re standing behind him in the Shop ’n Save checkout line instead of flipping through a Dwell at Whole Foods. It might make them less entertaining dinner companions, but the gains in class consciousness will more than compensate for any lack of fluency in microgreens and manchego.
Step 5. Cut centers, programs, and departments. Even—if you’re as daring as the Minnesotans were—dissolve the graduate school. For maximum impact, go for the arts and humanities first. Donors and corporate partners are unlikely to register the loss, and students on the softer side of campus are already steeped in leftist theory, jealous of their profs’ glory days in the sixties and convinced of the need to enlighten the masses, so they’ll take the dissolution particularly hard. (And when was the last time you saw video of stomatology students getting arrested for failure to disperse?)
Step 6. Keep that tenured head buried in the sand. Are flyers about a graduate student union showing up on the bulletin board across the hall? Did the administration just announce that graduate tuition and fees are going up? Who cares? You’ve already got fifty-two hours of research, peer reviewing, committee work, and lecturing to do every week, so going to bat for your grad students is the last thing on your to-do list, and you should let them know that—loud and clear. If a wild-eyed graduate student idealist asks you to talk to your faculty senate or to advocate for the union, blink confusedly, mumble something that intelligibly includes the word “busy,” and remember to keep your office lights dimmed next time you come in for a meeting. Knowing they’re on their own encourages graduate student self-reliance and solidarity with organizations that really can help them out.
Follow these six easy steps, and pretty soon your campus could join the lucky ones already garnering the attention of police and Fox news anchors. Then you can sit back and let your grad students and the exasperated public take it from there. As one effectively and efficiently radicalized student at the University at Albany put it last January, “A lot of people who are supposed to be protecting us aren’t doing that. So unless we turn a little wolfish on them, they’ll just eat the sheep.”
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
A Note For Those Who Advocate "English-Only" Policies
While putting together an encyclopedia entry on Latino struggle, I came across an observation from Rumbaut & Portes from their Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America anthology:
"Forceful assimilationism does not seek to expel newcomers but to integrate them as quickly as possible into the American mainstrean. English immersion and the rapid loss of languages and cultures promoted by assimilationist policies weaken immigrant parents' authority and help drive a wedge between generations [...] The paradox, is that, in seeking to make 'good Americans' out of the second generation, English immersion and similar programs undermine the single resource poor immigrant youths have to succeed: namely, the social capital inherent in their families and co-ethnic communities. In the programmatic scenario promoted by forceful assimilationism, schools and immigrant families work at cross-purposes, with negative consequences for both" (315).
This suggests the fundamentally maliciousness of English only policy that seeks to actually eliminate the possibility of upward mobility for immigrant communities and instead producing what the authors describe as a "rainbow underclass."
"Forceful assimilationism does not seek to expel newcomers but to integrate them as quickly as possible into the American mainstrean. English immersion and the rapid loss of languages and cultures promoted by assimilationist policies weaken immigrant parents' authority and help drive a wedge between generations [...] The paradox, is that, in seeking to make 'good Americans' out of the second generation, English immersion and similar programs undermine the single resource poor immigrant youths have to succeed: namely, the social capital inherent in their families and co-ethnic communities. In the programmatic scenario promoted by forceful assimilationism, schools and immigrant families work at cross-purposes, with negative consequences for both" (315).
This suggests the fundamentally maliciousness of English only policy that seeks to actually eliminate the possibility of upward mobility for immigrant communities and instead producing what the authors describe as a "rainbow underclass."
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Peru, Part 1: Aguantando Los Andes
I've been waiting to revisit my trip to Peru mostly because of pressure to get back into school work and to face the mountain of grading I had piling up on the days I spent not working, but I guess I have a moment tonight to spend some time deliberating on the things I've gleaned from Peru.
The more I look back on the trip the more it seems to culminate a lot of the ongoing processes of life for me in generative and positive ways.
I decided to educate myself more about Peru, it's history, and the struggles between left-guerillas in the countryside and an increasingly authoritarian state all verge on issues I want to explore for the dissertation, although mostly tangentially. Peru had a rather unique group emerge out of the late-70s/early-80s insurrectionary struggles going on throughout Latin America. They were dubbed Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), a break off group from other Maoist currents in Peru at the time. It's leader, a former political philosopher, Abimael Guzmán, insisted on the necessity of crossing "the river of blood" into a glorious post-capitalist world for which Peru was its threshold. This meant a strategy of attempting to choke the remnants of colonial social relations, capitalist exploitation, and neo-colonial arrangements from the society and the people through guerilla operations, reeducation, and terrorism. I don't know enough about them to say much beyond that their rhetoric seems born of a kind of mode of prophecy as much as politics, as killing in the name of the future seems to be highly valued for Sendero Luminoso (see Vice Magazine's article on contemporary musical dispatches from the group). Mario Vargas Llosa, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and perhaps one of the more right-wing members (he ran for president of Peru once on a neo-liberal platform, ugh!) of, what America's literary public likes to define as Latin America's New Narrative form, has written a novel on the issue called Lituma en Los Andes or Death in the Andes which I am still reading despite having visited Peru over a month ago. Llosa apparently once got into fisticuffs with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps over Marquez's wife (this part could be a rumor), in the Museo de Bellas Artes in downtown Mexico City.
The Inca too, offer a unique counterpoint to some of my thinking about the indigenous histories of Latin America (I have read mostly about Meso-American peoples and their traditions) insofar as the history of human sacrifice seems highly contested (between my tour guides of various destinations, but also a short piece I read from a feminist anthropologist). Apparently although their societies enforced strict gender segregation and roles, they tended to be roles with a great deal of gender parity, insofar as women served similar ritual roles as men with gender specific power and knowledge-sharing kinship structures. Women in these powerful roles were then targeted by the Spanish Inquisition post-conquest as witches.
However, despite the militaristic missionary work of much of the Spanish empire the emissaries from Spain encouraged and pursued aesthetic cultural syncretisms with Andean/Inca culture to facilitate conversion. I saw a great deal of this fascinating cultural blending in the facades of churches and cathedrals throughout the country (in one case I was informed that St. James, who was in some cases interpreted as the Moor killer, was repurposed as a ritual figure for the practice of Andean black magic).
The Spanish also had a difficult time destroying what were the foundations on Incan temples, buildings, and city walls so instead they often built on top of them. We saw a number of churches and walls in the Sacred Valley and in Cusco built on the former Incan foundations.
Cusco (or the "navel"), formerly a major city for the Inca, was our first significant stop of the trip before the hitting the Inca trail. It is a beautiful city involving a great deal of Spanish colonial architecture, lush plazas, and an altitude that might inspire illness (I had a headache for the duration of our stay). It is replete with tourists and those catering to tourism (too many pizza shops to count) which is after all one of Peru's largest industries. In addition to tourists and those in the tourism industry (including young women who would not stop offering massages) we encountered those who kept to some element on Andean native traditions: women with braids, wearing fedoras, and traditionally patterned sarapes in which they carried goods for sale or their children, kids carrying baby goats and lambs insisting that you hold them for a photo for a few soles (Peru's currency).
The soundtrack I would have stuck with was this volume of Peruvian cumbias (Afro-Latin rock) from the 1960s titled The Roots of Chicha, which I heard throughout the trip. My iPod broke on the plane ride, which was fine as I was on a hiatus from technology for the whole trip. This was one of the better decisions I made.
Regardless, I did prepare for the trip by imbibing this album in the weeks leading up to the trip. A decent track I would recommend from this album is as follows:
Another noteworthy and fascinating artist from Peru is Yma Sumac who had a five octave voice and I unfortunately discovered her only after the trip had ended. A few examples of her extraordinary and eerie talents below:
The more I look back on the trip the more it seems to culminate a lot of the ongoing processes of life for me in generative and positive ways.
I decided to educate myself more about Peru, it's history, and the struggles between left-guerillas in the countryside and an increasingly authoritarian state all verge on issues I want to explore for the dissertation, although mostly tangentially. Peru had a rather unique group emerge out of the late-70s/early-80s insurrectionary struggles going on throughout Latin America. They were dubbed Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), a break off group from other Maoist currents in Peru at the time. It's leader, a former political philosopher, Abimael Guzmán, insisted on the necessity of crossing "the river of blood" into a glorious post-capitalist world for which Peru was its threshold. This meant a strategy of attempting to choke the remnants of colonial social relations, capitalist exploitation, and neo-colonial arrangements from the society and the people through guerilla operations, reeducation, and terrorism. I don't know enough about them to say much beyond that their rhetoric seems born of a kind of mode of prophecy as much as politics, as killing in the name of the future seems to be highly valued for Sendero Luminoso (see Vice Magazine's article on contemporary musical dispatches from the group). Mario Vargas Llosa, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and perhaps one of the more right-wing members (he ran for president of Peru once on a neo-liberal platform, ugh!) of, what America's literary public likes to define as Latin America's New Narrative form, has written a novel on the issue called Lituma en Los Andes or Death in the Andes which I am still reading despite having visited Peru over a month ago. Llosa apparently once got into fisticuffs with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps over Marquez's wife (this part could be a rumor), in the Museo de Bellas Artes in downtown Mexico City.
The Inca too, offer a unique counterpoint to some of my thinking about the indigenous histories of Latin America (I have read mostly about Meso-American peoples and their traditions) insofar as the history of human sacrifice seems highly contested (between my tour guides of various destinations, but also a short piece I read from a feminist anthropologist). Apparently although their societies enforced strict gender segregation and roles, they tended to be roles with a great deal of gender parity, insofar as women served similar ritual roles as men with gender specific power and knowledge-sharing kinship structures. Women in these powerful roles were then targeted by the Spanish Inquisition post-conquest as witches.
However, despite the militaristic missionary work of much of the Spanish empire the emissaries from Spain encouraged and pursued aesthetic cultural syncretisms with Andean/Inca culture to facilitate conversion. I saw a great deal of this fascinating cultural blending in the facades of churches and cathedrals throughout the country (in one case I was informed that St. James, who was in some cases interpreted as the Moor killer, was repurposed as a ritual figure for the practice of Andean black magic).
The Spanish also had a difficult time destroying what were the foundations on Incan temples, buildings, and city walls so instead they often built on top of them. We saw a number of churches and walls in the Sacred Valley and in Cusco built on the former Incan foundations.
Cusco (or the "navel"), formerly a major city for the Inca, was our first significant stop of the trip before the hitting the Inca trail. It is a beautiful city involving a great deal of Spanish colonial architecture, lush plazas, and an altitude that might inspire illness (I had a headache for the duration of our stay). It is replete with tourists and those catering to tourism (too many pizza shops to count) which is after all one of Peru's largest industries. In addition to tourists and those in the tourism industry (including young women who would not stop offering massages) we encountered those who kept to some element on Andean native traditions: women with braids, wearing fedoras, and traditionally patterned sarapes in which they carried goods for sale or their children, kids carrying baby goats and lambs insisting that you hold them for a photo for a few soles (Peru's currency).
The soundtrack I would have stuck with was this volume of Peruvian cumbias (Afro-Latin rock) from the 1960s titled The Roots of Chicha, which I heard throughout the trip. My iPod broke on the plane ride, which was fine as I was on a hiatus from technology for the whole trip. This was one of the better decisions I made.
Regardless, I did prepare for the trip by imbibing this album in the weeks leading up to the trip. A decent track I would recommend from this album is as follows:
Another noteworthy and fascinating artist from Peru is Yma Sumac who had a five octave voice and I unfortunately discovered her only after the trip had ended. A few examples of her extraordinary and eerie talents below:
One of the drawbacks of the trip that was simultaneously a benefit for me was that we were traveling a group of people, the reason behind the trip affordability, few of which understood Spanish and even fewer who spoke any semblance of the language. Although the trip itinerary had been prepared ahead of time there are of course a numberless set of interactions one has to have in order to figure out where one is headed, confirmations, questions, and difficulties that arise as one travels. I was responsible for translating on almost all of these occasions. This pushed me to practice my Spanish a great deal. Although at times I resented it I think this experience made me feel like a more adequate traveller, someone who can handle and take care of themselves in Latin America with a little research and some occasionally tortured grammatical constructions. The only times I wanted to strangle the other travelers in my group was when they insisted I help them haggle for fractions of the dollar off of stupid shit they were buying, and forgetting that I wasn't being paid to help them in the first place, i.e. making stupid demands for my skills.
After a day in Cusco we awoke early to hit the trailhead of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. When we arrived after several stops and starts it was revealed that some of us had the wrong tickets for the type of traveller we were and thus 3 of us could not proceed onto the trail (for those of you thinking you are a graduate student and deserve to pay student prices for admission in Peru you should note that if you are 25 or older you are too old to be considered a student, unlike in the United States and Europe). This fact was devastating for the 3 left behind as the trip was centered around this element of Peru to begin with and for whatever opaquely bureaucratic reason they were not allowed to pay the remainder owed for a different ticket. Nor could they purchase tickets for any of the following days because the government limits the number of hikers on the trail, requiring that travelers prebook tickets.
Despite this setback I have to say the hike was challenging, beautiful, and fascinating. My boyfriend, his friend Becca, and I seemed to take to the altitude pretty well despite my constant headache and so we stayed ahead of the other hikers in our group most of the time, giving us space to talk as we liked and enjoy the sights together. It was the end of the rainy season so clouds were pouring over the mountains like rivers of the air making the hike between and around them all the more dramatic. The Inca believed (or so I was told) that the mountains were holy so the hike was more of a pilgrimage through the mountains and their passes, moving through multiple ecosystems and temperatures along the way on the way to Machu Picchu.
The second day was by far the most physically challenging. The altitude and steepness of the climb (which incidentally the trail is made out of uneven stone stairs carved by the Inca) made the highest points difficult to maintain a steady pace for very long. The lack of oxygen at times made my limbs feel as if they were heavier and more difficult to move. Towards the end of the highest pass we were stopping every 20 feet or so to catch our breaths, but with every break we felt completely rejuvenated and ready to tackle more. At the highest point that day the bf, Becca, and I looked at each other, bundled up against the cold and laughed at the joy of the accomplishment.
A note about the labor that made this trip possible: So even as we were looking at each other happy and satisfied by the hard work it took us and our backpacks up the hill, we had to notice the porters who were resting around us as well. The Peruvian government mandates that everyone who enters the Inca trail has to have a porter that goes along with them. I am not clear on the reasoning for this, perhaps, it just frees up a bunch of seasonally available jobs. If you are part of a tour group which most everyone was, they arranged this for you. The porters for our group carried food, cooking supplies, and tents which they set up before we arrived at the campsites. They usually kicked our asses on the trail, usually with nothing more than a sweater, shorts, and a pair of canvas golas scampering across slippery stairs. This reality made me relatively uncomfortable, several of us got together to put together some decent tips for the porters (because it turns out they don't make a great deal of money for 4 days of labor) and I was enjoined to make a speech to honor their labors (again as the only Spanish speaker) where I got to acknowledge this even as there seemed little I could do beyond this.
The rest of the hike which probably could have been consolidated into fewer days was peppered with smaller Incan ruins along the trail either food depots or guard towers (the tour guides seemed to be at odds about which at certain points), and amazing Incan mountainside terracing that we could see as the clouds slid across the faces of mountains and cliffs. The Inca also carved smooth rectangular tunnels into rock faces to ease the trail through which we easily passed, amidst rainforest limbs dripping with vegetation, moss, and moisture. On the last day we waited at the Sun Gate to see if the clouds would part so we could behold Machu Picchu from a good distance. Seeing the pockets of air open up the clouds and the former Incan city was really pretty amazing at the moment, mostly because we had been immersed in its environment for so long, and that we had worked to get there. I unconsciously approach tourism scenarios, I think most consumers of Western media do this, like I would instances in which I am a spectator--with a half-bored interest. Marching up the trail made seeing the city that much more spectacular.
One interesting element of the city is not only the resilience of it's foundations to the elements (it was discovered at the turn of the 19th-20th century), but also the ways in which debates about restoration seemed very much alive in the tour. Our guide was of the opinion that ruins should remain ruins, there is something unique in how ruins enable more open interpretations that restoration tends to foreclose upon, ignoring the history of the site since its abandonment.
We rounded off the trip with mineral baths in the public hotspring pools in Aguas Calientes (a nearby town) and a really expensive burrito I bought (burritos are not Peruvian food, but I was feeling rushed to catch a train) made out of a crepe and lima beans.
Monday, January 24, 2011
2004, Response to Rumsfeld
In reading Greg Grandin's excellent history of the 1980s proxy wars waged by President Ronald Reagan in Central America, entitled Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the New Imperialism, Grandin notes an Ecuadorean general's response to Donald Rumsfeld's insistence that Latin America begin to "consolidate control" by way of the United States of potential terrorist, drug-trafficking, and guerilla threats,
"'In Latin America,' Vargas retorted, 'there are no terrorists--only hunger and unemployment and deliquents who turn to crime. What are we going to do, hit you with a banana?'"
"'In Latin America,' Vargas retorted, 'there are no terrorists--only hunger and unemployment and deliquents who turn to crime. What are we going to do, hit you with a banana?'"
Sunday, January 16, 2011
First Book Review Published
My first publication is here, at Reviews in Cultural Theory, a new online journal.
Monday, November 29, 2010
A Season in Hell
In a recent visit to Chi-town I made a stop at Quimby's my source for underground smut, etc. While I was there I noticed a new translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell by Nick Sarno, someone who claims little expertise in French but promised a dying friend he would read the book, and completed a translation in homage to his friend.
Despite my now much more centered research foci I have always had an intense interest in French Modernist writing, particularly the work of homos like Jean Genet and Cocteau, etc. Although I find myself having very little to say that might be new with regard to these interests which is why they remain largely diletantish diversions than anything of the strong academic interest. Thus, Sarno's cottage industry publication appealed to this amateurish and personal fascination with this era. Passages like:
Beneath the leaves the wolf howls,
Bright feathers bursting from his mouth.
The remains of a freshly-eaten fowl:
Like him I consume myself (80).
get me going with narcissistic reverie. Alack.
Anyway, back to immigrant literature.
Despite my now much more centered research foci I have always had an intense interest in French Modernist writing, particularly the work of homos like Jean Genet and Cocteau, etc. Although I find myself having very little to say that might be new with regard to these interests which is why they remain largely diletantish diversions than anything of the strong academic interest. Thus, Sarno's cottage industry publication appealed to this amateurish and personal fascination with this era. Passages like:
Beneath the leaves the wolf howls,
Bright feathers bursting from his mouth.
The remains of a freshly-eaten fowl:
Like him I consume myself (80).
get me going with narcissistic reverie. Alack.
Anyway, back to immigrant literature.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
En Fin...
The way the qualifying/comprehensive exam process works in my program is we are supplied with 4+ questions at the beginning of a week and we are expected to select two, write two ten page essays in response to each, and then submit our answers to our committee members as well as 2 outside readers. After the committee and readers have taken the opportunity to read over the documents and your proposal (one element of the process that pushed the whole process further and further into the future for me) they meet with you for a span of one and a half to two hours in order to test your knowledge through your answers, bring other aspects of your reading and understanding the of the material to bear on the discussion, and to ask you to synthesize various schemas and concepts. After your orals then the committee and readers deliberate over whether or not you should pass and then move onto working toward your dissertation or whether or not you will need to do some remedial work in the coming months and undergo another examination.
I passed, but not without some impediments.
I haven't written anything for the last few years so my skills at making, as opposed to marking, arguments in a written form were a little rusty. As a result, I continued to face the radical variations in attention span that are attendant with high stress scenarios for me, coupled with denunciations of my examiners their poorly worded questions. The essays I think came out well in general, given some constraints that came from the coverage of my reading list and space in which to articulate my answers.
My mock orals with the other PhD students also went really well. I did blank on a question, but after I started going my momentum propelled the knowledge. They seemed to be claiming, that I was in fact ready.
The actual orals began with one member of my committee, however, communicating her displeasure at some of the supposed assumptions my exams were making about my field. The fact that they were locked into a particular set of historical circumstances (the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine, the militarization of the border, the rise of neo-liberalism, the possibilities for upward mobility in terms of new immigrant groups, etc.) that according to her didn't look at the long history of the concepts at work. Although I later realized that this reprimand was more directed at those on my committee and our deparment in general and seemed less to do with me specifically. Not having realized this right away I felt increasingly embattled as the exams proceeded, even though I never felt panicked, and I felt confident about my answers.
Anyway, the committee deliberated for what felt like 1/2 and hour (but was probably more like 10 minutes) and then congratulated me on passing.
Aftwards I felt relief but also a sense of loss. I've heard the state I'm in right now described to me as "postpartum," and I agree. There is something distinctly anti-climatic about the whole thing, and I've been feeling waxing and wanning sense of despair and then just orneriness. Also, I plagued with doubts about my performance, and whether or not I was handed, what is sometimes described as the "pity pass." All that said, I am excited to start working toward the diss and other projects I have in the works.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Less than 24 hours until I get my exam questions...
These two videos encapsulate my listening habits of late and also the contradictory state of my emotions right now:
Micachu
Botch
Micachu
Botch
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Anxiety Dreams
So, as my exam date rapidly approaches at the end of next month I am seized by both a sense of total unpreparedness and resulting anxiety, coupled with a lackadaisical devil-may-care confidence that I think is circumventing my ability to stay focused. As a result of this internal conflict my subconscious keeps trying to throttle me back into the appropriate attitude by filling my nights with anxiety dreams about some unforeseen confrontation between me and my advisor.
In the dreams I always enter an incredibly dark office lunchroom, that has the blinds and curtains drawn, and everything has a kind of blue cast. I am usually on my way somewhere as I pass through and I notice the silohuette of my advisor and another important person (usually a graduate student who I consider intelligent). They immediately stand up surprised and confront me about my progress claiming, "Are you ready to take responsibility for yourself?" or, more frightening, "We need to talk about scheduling a specific date." Throughout this brief but startling conversation, the shadows on my advisor's face are so dark that all I can see are the jaundiced whites of his eyes, in startling and cartoon-like relief. I think to some degree these dreams were also spurred by my getting a week off course by trying to tackle most of William Gaddis' JR, a 700+ page novel that is almost entirely dialogue.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
On Cynical Reason
Reading Slavoj Žižek's "How did Marx Invent the Symptom?," and came upon the following passage useful for those who want to debunk the sometimes liberatory appeals of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, turn in intellectual thought, or symptom of Western provincialism. He writes:
"Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it."
The notion of cynical reason for Žižek supplements his attempts to renew questions of ideology (the notion of false-consciousness, the primary medium by which we are convinced to pursue interests not our own, i.e. that we believe working 40 hours a week says something about our character rather than reducing our life spans and quality of life by way of stress, etc.) suited to more contemporary circumstances.
For me there is something very useful in thinking about cynicism as the logic of a neoliberal era where capitalism continues to demonstrate its tendency to generate crisis, disaster, and senselessly eat up our lives but we continue to tacitly assent not only to its order, but also to the recommended ways of thinking, e.g. "the pursuit of self-interest by everyone produces the best social outcomes," and refuse to imagine beyond it. This social shift seems by no means total and to some degree isolated, but this notion is a usefully descriptive concept because actually international monetary policy pushed "cost-benefit analysis" in the poor in places like Bolivia (in this case contributing to unintended consequences).
"Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it."
The notion of cynical reason for Žižek supplements his attempts to renew questions of ideology (the notion of false-consciousness, the primary medium by which we are convinced to pursue interests not our own, i.e. that we believe working 40 hours a week says something about our character rather than reducing our life spans and quality of life by way of stress, etc.) suited to more contemporary circumstances.
For me there is something very useful in thinking about cynicism as the logic of a neoliberal era where capitalism continues to demonstrate its tendency to generate crisis, disaster, and senselessly eat up our lives but we continue to tacitly assent not only to its order, but also to the recommended ways of thinking, e.g. "the pursuit of self-interest by everyone produces the best social outcomes," and refuse to imagine beyond it. This social shift seems by no means total and to some degree isolated, but this notion is a usefully descriptive concept because actually international monetary policy pushed "cost-benefit analysis" in the poor in places like Bolivia (in this case contributing to unintended consequences).
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Joaquín Murrieta, social bandit
I've written a little bit before about the "corrido" song form for the U.S./Mexico border but in some reading recently I uncovered an interesting argument over the nationality Joaquín Murrieta, a historical figure from Gold Rush era California who ostensibly fought the racism, greed, and violence Anglo prospectors. This figure is lionized here:
in his own corrido. Apparently, Murrieta was eventually caught by Captain Love and his Anglo Rangers, in 1853, who proceeded to decapitate this folk hero only to soak the dismembered head in alcohol for future public display. History attests to the importance of this figure who is taken up during the Chicano Civil rights struggle by Corky Gonzalez in his famous agit-prop poem "I am Joaquín." But Murrieta is also a figure that turns up as the central subject of a play of Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and in a novel by Chilean-American Isabel Allende, both who claim or at least infer that Murrieta was Chilean.
According to scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant (from whose article in a 2007 issue of Latino Studies I poached most of this information), "Ironically, the greater the emphasis on affirming the Mexican ancestry of Joaquin [by the corrido and subsequent cultural returns to his legacy], the more his Chilean origins become plausible" (500). Although Torres-Saillant's point in this article is rather minor, that South and Central American immigrants have a much longer legacy in the United States than scholars have afforded them before, it strikes me as uniquely interesting the repository Pan-Americanism that this figure seems to participate in--a revolutionary anti-imperialist doctrine fostered by important figures in Latin America, including Fidel Castro, Jose Martí, Che Guevarra, Bernardo Vegas, and the list goes on. Or at the very least Murrieta functions as a kind of transnational figure for the liberatory aspirations of Latinos both within and without the United States.
in his own corrido. Apparently, Murrieta was eventually caught by Captain Love and his Anglo Rangers, in 1853, who proceeded to decapitate this folk hero only to soak the dismembered head in alcohol for future public display. History attests to the importance of this figure who is taken up during the Chicano Civil rights struggle by Corky Gonzalez in his famous agit-prop poem "I am Joaquín." But Murrieta is also a figure that turns up as the central subject of a play of Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and in a novel by Chilean-American Isabel Allende, both who claim or at least infer that Murrieta was Chilean.
According to scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant (from whose article in a 2007 issue of Latino Studies I poached most of this information), "Ironically, the greater the emphasis on affirming the Mexican ancestry of Joaquin [by the corrido and subsequent cultural returns to his legacy], the more his Chilean origins become plausible" (500). Although Torres-Saillant's point in this article is rather minor, that South and Central American immigrants have a much longer legacy in the United States than scholars have afforded them before, it strikes me as uniquely interesting the repository Pan-Americanism that this figure seems to participate in--a revolutionary anti-imperialist doctrine fostered by important figures in Latin America, including Fidel Castro, Jose Martí, Che Guevarra, Bernardo Vegas, and the list goes on. Or at the very least Murrieta functions as a kind of transnational figure for the liberatory aspirations of Latinos both within and without the United States.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Exam Date Update
My committee, like those of almost all graduate students I know, has taken two months to figure out an actual date for the oral defense of my exams, which was originally meant to be in Mid-May. In that time I charted out a reading schedule that essentially presented me with the dilemma of having to read a book a day, potentially feasbile if I didn't also have to finish teaching and take notes on said readings.
Thus, I presented myself in a shamefaced manner to my advisor asking for an end of June or early July date instead (summer exams are usually hard to pull off as your committee is not usually around to preside over it). My worst-case fantasy being that he would say, "You know we took a risk on you letting you into the program, and this is below our expectations." Instead he was very understanding and I did not have to relate any of the painful personal details of the last 6 months.
However, although my advisor will be around in that time frame, none of the other members of my committee will be, moving my exam date to August. This is rather late in the process, but I have to say it's a blessing in disguise as I already felt my body converting itself into work-yourself-to-death-breakdown mode.
In other news this song by Kelis rules, and Lady Gaga blows:
Thus, I presented myself in a shamefaced manner to my advisor asking for an end of June or early July date instead (summer exams are usually hard to pull off as your committee is not usually around to preside over it). My worst-case fantasy being that he would say, "You know we took a risk on you letting you into the program, and this is below our expectations." Instead he was very understanding and I did not have to relate any of the painful personal details of the last 6 months.
However, although my advisor will be around in that time frame, none of the other members of my committee will be, moving my exam date to August. This is rather late in the process, but I have to say it's a blessing in disguise as I already felt my body converting itself into work-yourself-to-death-breakdown mode.
In other news this song by Kelis rules, and Lady Gaga blows:
Thursday, April 1, 2010
"While nobody is so naïve as to believe that there are any
beliefs that are empirically universal, Žižek and Badiou sensibly affirm
that a truth without a universal vocation is a poor thing—in short, not a
truth at all—and that furthermore, without the notion of truth (a belief
which is addressed to everyone), there can be no ideology (or rather, only
one entirely hegemonic and therefore invisible ideology) and therefore no
politics, only the management of (cultural, linguistic, professional, etc.)
differences."
--Nick Brown "{∅,S} ∍ {$} ?, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek,
Waiting for Something to Happen."
beliefs that are empirically universal, Žižek and Badiou sensibly affirm
that a truth without a universal vocation is a poor thing—in short, not a
truth at all—and that furthermore, without the notion of truth (a belief
which is addressed to everyone), there can be no ideology (or rather, only
one entirely hegemonic and therefore invisible ideology) and therefore no
politics, only the management of (cultural, linguistic, professional, etc.)
differences."
--Nick Brown "{∅,S} ∍ {$} ?, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek,
Waiting for Something to Happen."
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The Beats...
So reading On the Road for my exams, which is much better than I remember it being pushed me to seek out photos of the Beats, in particular Neal Cassady the avenging angel and inspiration for On the Road.
Additional history offered by the introduction indicates that Neal Cassady, recalling his days as a street hustler, amorously pursued Allen Ginsberg in order to coax Ginsberg to teach him to write poetry. Moments in the novel suggest a quasi-sexual union in which Ginsberg (i.e. Carlo Marx in the novel) and Cassady take benzedrine and speak with complete and utter honesty with each other, experiences of which Cassady's girlfriend at the time was extremely jealous (suggestive rather than illicit).
Anyway, hot photos of Cassady and also William Burroughs looking sophisticated and hot in his youth from the Allen Ginsberg archive.
Additional history offered by the introduction indicates that Neal Cassady, recalling his days as a street hustler, amorously pursued Allen Ginsberg in order to coax Ginsberg to teach him to write poetry. Moments in the novel suggest a quasi-sexual union in which Ginsberg (i.e. Carlo Marx in the novel) and Cassady take benzedrine and speak with complete and utter honesty with each other, experiences of which Cassady's girlfriend at the time was extremely jealous (suggestive rather than illicit).
Anyway, hot photos of Cassady and also William Burroughs looking sophisticated and hot in his youth from the Allen Ginsberg archive.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Honour Killings
I love London Review of Books, they give you some rather in depth history of a subject often reviewing multiple books so you don't have to, or exploring significant issues with some sense of the interlocutors. Here is one article that seized my attention by Jacqueline Rose discussing "Honour Killings" committed by immigrants to Europe.
She is careful to distinguish exactly how these killings are mobilized for internal and external colonial efforts and brings the relevant issues to bear on feminist approaches to the subject.
She is careful to distinguish exactly how these killings are mobilized for internal and external colonial efforts and brings the relevant issues to bear on feminist approaches to the subject.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Harrowing Weeks Since
So these last few weeks have produced absolutely no posts from me and this mostly has to do with some emotionally trying and difficult things going on in my personal life. In order to represent its simultaneously painful and tacky, clichéd quality of this experience I present a scene from Fass Binder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant without subtitles:
Highlights from the last couple weeks include:
1) Talking my advisor down. Was finally able to make the point that there is in fact a "last instance" when it comes to Latino immigration to the United States (for those unfamiliar with Louis Althusser this will make no sense). He intimidates the crap out of me so this was a step in the direction of me becoming his colleague and not merely his student.
2) Discussing academic porno. So in the reading "How To Tame a Wild Tongue" by Gloria Anzaldua my students and I encountered the phrase "my mouth is a motherlode." This made me burst into laughter immediately which my students didn't understand. Upon later discussion with other grad. student friends we decided that this would be an amazing title for a gang-bang porno staring Anzaldua. Picture the final money shot scene on her mouth, she a nude older Mexican woman, brown breasts flying, turquoise jewelry splayed everywhere.
3) Encountering this phrase in a work by Americo Paredes, "the American taste for ham plays a big part in border folklore, and now and then one hears the term gringo jamonero" as a derisive term for Americans--ha!
4) Despite a broken bike frame that I've had for almost 6 years, I've started sucking it up and working on a much newer frame I purchased to produce my dream bicycle. With some help from friends identifying appropriate parts, I'm feeling pretty good that it might be done by the end of january.
5) Amanda Blank has a few good tracks:
6) The semester is over almost a week earlier than usual and I only have 7 student papers to grade.
Highlights from the last couple weeks include:
1) Talking my advisor down. Was finally able to make the point that there is in fact a "last instance" when it comes to Latino immigration to the United States (for those unfamiliar with Louis Althusser this will make no sense). He intimidates the crap out of me so this was a step in the direction of me becoming his colleague and not merely his student.
2) Discussing academic porno. So in the reading "How To Tame a Wild Tongue" by Gloria Anzaldua my students and I encountered the phrase "my mouth is a motherlode." This made me burst into laughter immediately which my students didn't understand. Upon later discussion with other grad. student friends we decided that this would be an amazing title for a gang-bang porno staring Anzaldua. Picture the final money shot scene on her mouth, she a nude older Mexican woman, brown breasts flying, turquoise jewelry splayed everywhere.
3) Encountering this phrase in a work by Americo Paredes, "the American taste for ham plays a big part in border folklore, and now and then one hears the term gringo jamonero" as a derisive term for Americans--ha!
4) Despite a broken bike frame that I've had for almost 6 years, I've started sucking it up and working on a much newer frame I purchased to produce my dream bicycle. With some help from friends identifying appropriate parts, I'm feeling pretty good that it might be done by the end of january.
5) Amanda Blank has a few good tracks:
6) The semester is over almost a week earlier than usual and I only have 7 student papers to grade.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
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